


A Butterfly Garden

by Vita_S_West



Series: soft epilogue [1]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Gardens & Gardening, Healthy Discussions of Therapy, Post Series, Rediscover Hobbies, Soft Epilogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:14:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23900644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vita_S_West/pseuds/Vita_S_West
Summary: "With an old job to wander back to, Lucy had a few clear steps on her path ahead and could clarify and reevaluate as she went. It was different for Flynn. Even with his pardon, he had little interest in going back to the work of national security after his family, his years on the run, time travelling and fighting Rittenhouse. Besides, no matter his service or if he had wanted to, they wouldn’t have him back."Lucy and Flynn get back to what's left of life after Rittenhouse. While Lucy goes back to teaching, Flynn takes up gardening...
Relationships: Garcia Flynn/Lucy Preston
Series: soft epilogue [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1855366
Comments: 11
Kudos: 61





	A Butterfly Garden

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this came from that tweet that went "it's time to rediscover hobbies" and the tumblr comment that went "NOT LIKE THIS". Oh well, here's some domestic, gardening fluff. It's been my niche in my other fandoms, so it's nice to bring it to Timeless. Pls enjoy!

Lucy had always had some semblance of a _something_ to go back to after Rittenhouse. It wasn’t exactly a life, per se, as she had lost her mother, her sister and so many of the other things that mattered to her. But she still had her job at the university, her research, and all the accompanying demands of an academic career. While she had had a leave of absence from Homeland Security that created an excuse, she still had a hole in her resume where publications and awards should have been.

Turns out, you can’t put classified material on a resume or teaching evaluations.

Lucy no longer had an exact, five-year life plan of the sort she used to make—while, of course, consulting her mother’s expectations—but she had a starting place and direction for life after… everything. 

_Everything_. It was a benign short-hand for a series of events, phenomena, and traumas that no one besides those involved would know about or could fully understand. Aside from what they had experienced, centuries of wonders, hardship and heartbreak in a few short years, their lives had been on pause. They had all lost friends and clear career trajectories, while some had lost families, through death or paradox. Calling it _everything_ seemed at once reductive and summative. But just as people had done for centuries, returning to their lives—a cobbled semblance of normalcy—after wars, famine, refugee-ship, pandemics, and the like, they went to bed at night and got up in the morning and, in short, went about their days as best they could make them.

It was both extraordinary and utterly ordinary and they had no one to share it with but each other.

With an old job to wander back to, Lucy had a few clear steps on her path ahead and could clarify and reevaluate as she went.

It was different for Flynn. Even with his pardon, he had little interest in going back to working in national security after his family, his years on the run, time travelling and fighting Rittenhouse.

Besides, no matter his service or if he _had_ wanted to, they wouldn’t have him back.

It wasn’t an immediate problem. There were many loose ends and spare pieces to wrap up and set into place. But as weeks wore on, turning slowly to months, with those months themselves multiplying, it became clear to Flynn and Lucy that life would keep going even after their mission had ended. They transitioned out of the bunker and out of time travel-related work. Soon, there was nothing to go back to and no piece left to worry about.

Lucy could return to the study of history as a spectator rather than a participant. She could reacquaint herself with some of her finest pleasures—teaching and learning. In an altered timeline, there was a lot to learn and relearn. Lucy found that it was something of a balm to all the other changes she had to manage.

At first, Flynn seemed weary of the new freedom opening before him. It took him some time to get used to it and its wide range of possibilities. If he wanted to go for a walk at two in the morning or two in the afternoon, he could. If he wanted to get into the car and drive, well, _anywhere_ , he could.

With such a wide range of possibilities, he seemed almost paralyzed, as he cut the endless possibilities short by centring his life on their home.

There were benefits of course. He did the laundry, most of the cooking and the cleaning. Lucy would come home to neatly folded clothing in the drawers, a hot meal on the table and a bathroom that practically sparkled. She could worry more about work and getting her career on track without having to worry about the day-to-day domestic necessities. She appreciated it but she gradually grew to worry about whether Flynn was wasting his considerable talents. 

Lucy found herself buying him books and leaving leaflets before she left for work in the morning. She tried not to push, but could feel her anxiety rising. With her fear of claustrophobia, of being _trapped_ , Flynn’s seeming stuck-ness began to concern her. 

It was something of a relief—and a confusion—when Lucy arrived home one afternoon to find their kitchen table covered with seed packets and seed trays, complete with instructions, charts and maps of USDA hardiness zones.

“What’s all this?” she asked, pausing in the doorway.

“I’ve been thinking we have that yard back there, we may as well do something with it.”

“What are we planting?” Lucy came to stand at the table, picking up a few seed packets to examine. “Vegetables or—”

“Flowers mostly. And some shrubs. California wild rose and California lilac and maybe some seathrift. That sort of thing.”

“That sort of thing? Why those ones?”

“They’re good for butterflies and pollinators and, you know, climate change is still a thing in this timeline so it doesn’t hurt to make that kind of garden.”

“Still fighting the good fight, huh,” she said.

He smiled but didn’t answer. Instead he said, “How was work?”

As she told him about her day, he spooned out dinner, which was waiting on the stove onto plates. They took their meal to the back porch, sitting on the steps, silently agreeing not to bother clearing off the table.

“We need to get some patio furniture,” she mused.

“Mm.”

“With a garden it’ll be quite nice to hang out back here.”

“I hope so.”

Lucy eyed Flynn for a moment before asking, “Everything okay?”

He nodded after a moment. “Yeah, it’s just I think I need a hobby.”

“Right,” Lucy nodded right away.

“A job too,” he admitted.

Lucy didn’t want to admit right away that this had been on her mind for a while. “What have you been thinking about that?” she asked with a forced lightness that was nearly cringe-worthy.

“I’m not really sure yet.”

“You have a lot of experience and expertise. Not just time travel related, but language skills, tech skills. I was reading about analyst competency profiles last week and—”

“Lucy, I,” he drew in a rough intake of breath that he held for a moment. “I have thought of that, but I think I just need some more time right now.”

“Of course,” Lucy said.

She tried not to feel disappointment as the opening she saw closed with the firmness of a heavy door. She didn’t want to rush him and she wasn’t entirely sure what there was to rush him into. Lucy didn’t exactly ascribe to any myths about productivity and accomplishment being the meaning of life. Even if she did, she would have to admit that he had already saved the country and countless lives. They had the entire rest of their lives ahead of them and the both of them had already accomplished herculean tasks, the kind that would easily fill a biography or memoir. If anything was declassified, that is. If all Flynn wanted to do was the laundry, who was she to contradict him? Who was to say that wasn’t as important?

Over the course of the weeks that followed, Flynn planted seeds in containers that crowded every windowsill in the house. He dug up their backyard, raised flower beds out of the dirt, mixed manure into dirt, and painstakingly labelled each section of the yard. Seeds sprouted into seedlings and he meticulously watered and took them outside to acclimatize them to the sun, the temperature and the wind.

It was a labour that required patience that Lucy hadn’t fully realized he was capable of. On missions, his instincts seemed to act exclusively through his trigger finger. She wondered how much that was wrapped up in rage and grief, rather than an inability to adapt his strategy. 

Lucy watched Flynn take care of the plants and the garden with the same meticulous love and care he did their home. It was with the same meticulous love and care he took of her.

Moving the seedlings into the garden wasn’t the end. Every night he weeded and watered and examined every bug that took to the garden. Some he left alone, remarking that they would be good for the garden. Others he promptly removed and stepped on, declaring them to be a potential scourge. 

Soon, their yard didn’t seem big enough for the Mexican sunflowers, bee balms, California poppies, blanket flowers, California wild roses and checkerbloom. It looked more like a meadow, cruelly fenced in, rather than a garden. He transferred the California lilac further back to their fence and the other cutting to their front steps. 

Lucy didn’t know enough about gardening to know that some of the plants he so carefully tended to were considered weeds by others. She was merely taken by how quickly the yard transformed as the weeks carried on.

“We’ll start getting caterpillars soon,” he told her one evening as she helped with the watering. The buds were so swollen that some of their petals were already springing free. “Maybe some California sisters. Those like California poppies.”

“California sisters on California poppies,” Lucy said. “It sounds like it could be a tongue twister.”

“It’s easy to remember at any rate.”

“It makes me wish we had more space.”

“We just need to optimize. Maybe get some window boxes, too.”

“I want patio furniture first. We can’t keep sitting on the ground to eat dinner. And read.” It was Lucy’s new favourite reading spot and she was also beginning to fantasize about hammocks.

He straightened when she said that, his fist filled with dandelions that he had just yanked up. His forehead shone with sweat and there was a streak of dirt across his cheek. His eyebrows went up. “You want some lawn furniture?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Why didn’t you say so sooner?”

“I don’t know. You seemed preoccupied.”

“We can get some this weekend.”

It was just that simple. They finished up that evening and showered off the sweat, the dirt and the day, and settled into bed, enjoying cool sheets and soft touches. That weekend, they went to several stores. Flynn was set on getting the right size of furniture, the right style with the right level of comfort and coziness, for a good price. Lucy was happy to be along for the ride, though it turned out, Flynn’s shopping experience came from time periods and areas in the world where bartering was a given and she needed to intercede on one occasion. She also found herself exchanging texts with Wyatt, asking for advice, which Flynn was reticent to take. But Wyatt put them on the path to a good store. There, they settled on a pair of chairs with a dark grain and warm blue cushions and a small table that would easily accommodate the two of them, but would not house many guests.

“We’ll just move the kitchen table close to the back door if anyone comes over,” Flynn said.

“You just want to keep it to yourself,” Lucy said, as they dragged the box into their cart.

He shrugged, “Haven’t we earned our alone time?”

“I suppose so. But Wyatt did ask about coming over to see the garden.”

“Fine, but tell him we’re not getting a barbecue. We can do that at his place.”

“He has a barbecue?” Lucy asked, as they fell into step behind the cart and made their way to the cash.

“It’s Wyatt. If he _doesn’t_ have a barbecue, I’ll cook and eat this furniture,” Flynn said, patting the box.

Lucy snorted. “Please don’t. It took us all day to find it.”

Another short series of texts confirmed that Wyatt did have a barbecue and invited them both over the next night to enjoy the fruits of its labour. (He’d actually texted “the meats of my grill”, but Lucy had groaned and decided to promptly forget the unfortunate phrasing.) Lucy and Flynn spent the early evening after an early dinner—they’d skipped lunch in their shopping haze—arguing and assembling the furniture.

At first, Lucy had planned to let Flynn take the lead on assembling, until she realized he didn’t plan on using the instructions. They then argued about how to decipher the instructions, which was largely pictographic and ambiguous when it came to screw sizes. While Flynn had thought that was very funny and insisted on several jokes, Lucy irritably denied that they were jokes. This led to an argument of who was the “funny one” and who was actually “just a joke”, the disassembled furniture, lying forgotten at their feet.

In the end, they found a youtube video on the assembly of their model of patio furniture and the sailing went much smoother thereafter.

Solemnly, examining the chairs and table, Flynn said, "Time for the test drive."

They sat across from each other, enjoying their hard work quietly as the evening drew on, a soft gradient of blue and lilac colouring the sky. 

“It’s really nice back here,” Lucy said finally, her voice no louder than a whisper, so as not to disturb the hard won comfort of their silence.

“I’m glad you like it,” Flynn said. 

“You never mentioned gardening before.”

“It’s new,” he admitted, “but I think it’s good for me.”

“You seem to really like it," Lucy agreed. "It’s a good hobby."

“It’s that, but I think the garden is also," he paused before finishing, "therapeutic."

"How do you mean?"

"It's been a way for me to see how I could create something new. Instead of all the killing and destruction from fighting Rittenhouse for so long, I could create something beautiful and help bring life. And I wanted to bring some beauty to your life after… everything.”

Lucy nodded slowly. “It must be nice to build something without worrying that someone will come along and…” she trailed off when she saw his grimace.

“I have been afraid of that actually,” he said, his voice low and his eyes dark.

“What do you mean?” Lucy straightened in her chair, her brow furrowing.

“I think part of the garden was… I wanted to take care of you. I know you’ve been under pressure to make up for lost time at work. You were struggling to get tenure before all this… And now you’re trying to make up for lost time. After running around, essentially doing field work and getting shot at, now you’re at a desk. I… I do know what an adjustment that can be. You get an adrenaline rush if someone closes a cabinet too hard."

It was Lucy's turn to grimace. She hadn't wanted to admit it, but there was more than a little truth to his words.

"I wanted to take care of things so you didn’t have to worry about them.” He finished with a shrug, but there was relief to in his eyes, as if he'd been holding these words back for a long time.

Lucy stared at him. “But I was worried about you!”

“What?” He looked startled.

"I don’t,” she paused to pick her words carefully, “mean this critically. You’ve just seemed a little aimless. I’m happy that the garden made you happy and I want you to keep doing it. I want you to do things that make you happy.” She realized what she had wanted to say for months and felt foolish at how simple it had been all along. How could she have let this go unsaid for so long? “I want you to be happy," she said again, "and I want you to talk to me and tell me if anything's been wrong. If you've been upset.”

Flynn absorbed this with a slow nod. He took a moment to weigh his own words carefully. “I think l've been reluctant to start rebuilding my life because… after everything that happened I was scared.”

“What of?”

“Being happy.”

“What? Why, because you don’t think you deserve it?” Lucy demanded, her eyes flashing. She wasn’t sure how to express how angry she was at the thought.

“No.”

“Then why, Garcia?”

“I was scared I would build a new life with you that I would be happy and then it would all fall apart again. I was scared I would lose everything so I didn’t even want to start.”

“But Garcia, we already started. We’ve been building a life all along,” Lucy waved her arm at the garden, at the patio furniture. They had a house they’d moved into, a garden he’d created, furniture they’d assembled. 

“I know,” he said slowly.

“It’s… it’s all finished. Rittenhouse, the government chasing you—”

“I know,” he said again. “I didn’t say that it was rational, but…” He paused to take another breath as if he were afraid he weren't sure how to continue. “After all these years, after all the fighting and violence and death, it didn’t feel real to be free. And I was scared that it would all fall apart and I would be back where I started. Broken with nothing. Like I was in that bar in Sao Paulo.”

“But Garcia even… you had me when you were in that bar. I’m always going to be here for you. And if I’m not enough, well, I’m back on the university health insurance plan. We can find you someone more professional—”

“I don’t know if _that’s_ what I want—”

“There’s no shame in it, Garcia. Jiya has been seeing someone and I’ve been… I’ve been thinking about it, too. There’s no shame," she said again. "If you don’t want to, that’s fine, but if you need to, we can find someone for you, too. I just want you to be okay.”

At that he got up and walked around the table to her, pulling her into his arms and rubbing her back. He rested his chin on her head, as his hand drifted up and down her back, tracing calming circles. _She_ had meant to be the reassuring one.

“I know that I have you. I know. I think the other part of the garden was,” he paused to measure the words carefully, as if they didn’t fully fit in his mouth. Lucy pulled away to look up at him. “The other part of it was I never thought I would have this kind of life again. A quiet life… laundry in the dryer, dishes in the sink, patio furniture, bumblebees!” It was his turn to wave his arm in a sweeping motion at the seeming absurdity of daily monotony. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to live so _normally_ again. I wanted to enjoy it. I wanted to enjoy taking care of you and having a home that I chose with the person I loved.” 

Lucy gave him a watery smile, one that froze when she felt the sigh in his chest against her own. 

“I’m not sure I’m going to be okay for a while,” he admitted quietly. “But the gardening helps, the little chores and you, too, of course. Especially you. I am feeling better, but it’s going to take a while, Lucy.”

“That’s okay, too,” she assured him. “I just want you to know I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

He buried his face in her hair, desperate as a prayer and whispered, his voice hoarse, “Thank you.”

“I love you,” she whispered into his chest. He breathed it back, so soft she didn’t entirely hear it, but felt it on the exhalation of his breath, drifting past her hair and into her ear.

They stayed like that for a long several, silent minutes, holding each other. Somewhere in the distance a nightingale called and a horn honked. Above them, the lurid colours of the sky began to fade and darken. Still, they stayed like that for a long time, in the quiet and the peace that they made.


End file.
